Federal prosecutors filed more charges this week against the former V.I. Housing Finance Authority executive who was indicted last summer in connection with a multimillion-dollar disaster recovery fraud.
Darin Richardson, former chief operating officer, was arrested and charged alongside Davidson and Sasha Charlemagne in June in connection with an alleged scheme that prosecutors said allowed the Charlemagnes to collect millions of federal dollars while leaving government-owned disaster recovery materials exposed to the elements.
Richardson was initially charged with criminal conflict of interest and making material false statements. Davidson Charlemagne was charged with government program fraud and wire fraud, and both Charlemagnes were charged with money laundering conspiracy. A federal judge agreed to sever Richardson’s case from the Charlemagnes’ in September. In October, prosecutors tacked on eight charges of making false claims against the United States against the Charlemagnes for allegedly submitting fraudulent timesheets.
In a second superseding indictment filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday, prosecutors charged Richardson with bank fraud, making false statements on a loan application and money laundering. An additional charge of wire fraud was also made against Sasha Charlemagne.
The VIHFA awarded a nearly $3 million contract to manage and store a large consignment of lumber for use in disaster recovery projects to Island Services Group — with the Charlemagnes’ company, D&S Trucking, as a subcontractor.
According to prosecutors, D&S Trucking lacked the proper insurance for such a contract and Davidson Charlemagne never disclosed his position as maintenance director for the V.I. Education Department, a position he allegedly leveraged to store the lumber rent-free at Alexander Henderson Elementary School on St. Croix.
The initial indictment stated that a rival bid for the contract by the Texas-based Infrastructure and Disaster Recovery Group was altered by “unknown coconspirators after it was submitted to VIHFA, effectively making the IDRG bid less competitive than the bid submitted by ISG and D&S Trucking.” Regardless, prosecutors acknowledged that IDRG was ineligible for the contract because the company wasn’t registered in a federal database called the System for Award Management — or SAM — and lacked a Dun & Bradstreet number, which function like Social Security numbers for businesses.
Richardson, who led a bid evaluation committee at VIHFA, gave ISG and D&S Trucking’s bid higher ratings and did not discuss the rival bid, according to the indictment. Prosecutors said it was inappropriate for Richardson to award the contract — which they said “included vastly inflated cost estimates for labor” — because he also served on the evaluation committee.
Over the next two years, while Richardson was still serving as COO of the V.I. Housing Finance Authority, the value of the contract was increased multiple times until it totaled more than $4.4 million.
During this period, according to the indictment, Richardson received a $107,000 payment from the owner of ISG — and falsely claimed in a subsequent interview with a special agent from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department’s Inspector General Office that he had recused himself from all matters related to the company.
ISG’s owner is referred to as “Individual One” in court documents but identified as Morris Anselmi in a heavily redacted memorandum of an interview with HUD agents attached to an August court filing. Anselmi was himself indicted alongside fellow ISG principal Kimberly McCollum last February for fraudulently taking in nearly a million dollars in federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.
According to the HUD interview, Anselmi said Richardson was looking for investors to open a food court. He also claimed that he told Richardson that he couldn’t go into business with him until Richardson stepped down from VIHFA. Anselmi said he didn’t know when the payment to Richardson was transferred but that Richardson told him he was no longer at VIHFA at the time. Later, Anselmi said he and McCollum “had money coming in from different sources, AECOM, Captain Morgan, DIAGIO, schools, APTIM,” according to the investigator’s notes.
Prosecutors tied the latest charges against Richardson to the financial exchange with Anselmi.
Richardson requested a $200,000 construction loan from Banco Popular in August 2020 to build a single-family home in Estate Bordeaux on St. Thomas, according to the most recent filing, and a loan agreement was executed in December of that year. That agreement included a detailed construction estimate purportedly prepared by Four Star Construction but actually prepared by Richardson.
“This gave the appearance that the estimate of the construction costs was created by Four Star, a construction company,” prosecutors said. “Consequently, this estimate was relied upon by BPPR in approving the loan and loan amount.”
According to the indictment, Richardson drew upon the loan in three installments and used $50,500 from the third installment — “together with the $107,000 from Individual One” — to purchase an entirely different property in Estate Fortuna through a U.S. Marshals Service property auction.
An initial appearance and arraignment for Richardson and Sasha Charlemagne is scheduled for Thursday morning.
